A lot has been said and discussed about RIM’s downfall: indecisive leadership, inability to innovate at fast pace, and no clear path to recovery. I don’t disagree at all with the analysis and the interpretation of the situation, but I do disagree with the conclusion that many people are drawing and vehemently disagree with their advice to RIM to keep trying to regain the smartphone market share. That train has left the station and RIM doesn’t have a chance to catch up, even if they do everything that they could.

But RIM may have stumbled upon something that they probably least expected. It’s the BlackBerry Messaging, popularly known as BBM. We got to see the power of BBM during the London riots. During my recent trip to India, I firsthand witnessed how much of people’s lives depend on BBM. These people were sad, upset, and depressed due to a RIM infrastructure outage. This is a phenomenal success. The recipe behind this success is quite simple: provide free messaging that looks likes SMS that supports groups in a network. RIM has significantly leveraged network effects; BBM got better as more and more people used it. The sale of BlackBerry in India has gone viral. The consumers buy Blackberries since their friends have it so that they can chat with them for free and perhaps do their emails. These consumers don’t use any apps at all! Their needs are quite simple. These phones are also priced well – the median price is somewhat around $200 for an unlocked phone. The Indian middle class and upper middle class have no issues shelling out this money to buy a BlackBerry. I talked to quite a few people and they are moving away from Android and iPhone to BlackBerry. Yes, that’s right. If RIM can manage to introduce lower end versions of BlackBerry this will further fuel the growth.

May be, just may be, there’s a category between smart and non-smart phones. For a large number of people in emerging economies making a phone call and staying in touch with their friends and family via text messages and email, and not paying too much for doing that are the driving reasons to purchase a right kind of a phone.

Let’s briefly look at the history of RIM. It was the device of choice for email and calendering and perhaps still is for a lot of people. RIM myopically focused on going after the enterprise customers while iPhone and Android pulled the rug underneath them. RIM initially ignored and later underestimated the disruptive nature of this innovation. What started out as a consumer market, iPhone and Android easily crossed the chasm and entered into an enterprise and started replacing BlackBerry. We all know this story. But, something happened during this era of RIM: they ended up building a massively scalable and reliable enterprise class messaging infrastructure. This is an amazing feat of technical excellence. Building BlackBerry Messaging was a logical extension of leveraging this infrastructure. What if RIM uses this as a strength and not worry about competing in the smart OS area.

It’s time to pivot.

Build a robust phone that is primarily driven off by BlackBerry Messaging and double down in emerging economies. Change the rules of the game and beat Nokia at its own strategy. Even better, spin off BlackBerry into two separate businesses: one that exclusively focuses on this strength and the other that embraces innovation by OEMing either Android or Windows or both and defend the handset as well as the services market share. I don’t believe BlackBerry is cut out to innovate on a new smart phone OS quick enough to beat iOS or Android or an emerging contender, Windows phone. That would mean playing by your competitors’ rules. If you learn one thing from Apple, it would be not to do this.

I don’t need to tell you how many cellphones the Indians own and how many of those can buy a BlackBerry. This may not be an intended move, but this social effects driven business in emerging economies such as India as well as in other developed countries could be the second act for BlackBerry. Can other vendors replicate this? May be. Not many companies in the world can do what BlackBerry does with emails and messaging in general. Group messaging on a mobile device is a killer app in itself to drive the sales of handsets. Also, this works across the carriers and the geographies, essentially allowing RIM not to be threatened by a provider. SMS GupShup in India has been an extremely popular group messaging service. It’s a validation that there is significant untapped potential for RIM.

Technology, Design, and Innovation strategist at the Office of the CEO, SAP, focusing on technology and architecture strategy and strategic operational, product, and management innovation. Adjunct faculty at Santa Clara University and San Jose State University with the department of computer engineering teaching graduate classes. Frequent speaker at conferences, special events, Chirag blogs at Cloud Computing.

2 responses to “To RIM: Don’t Change The Strategy, Change The Rules”

iMessage on iPads and iphones is virtually the identical technology – it also allows device to device chat for free and I use it all the time. A lot of people just do not seem to have cottoned onto it yet. Given that the capability is no longer unique I think that this train too has left.

I agree that iMessage exists, but it’s not group messaging. BBM has been extremely popular in the group messaging category. My view is that social network driven group messaging, which is easily accessible from a phone is a killer application to make the phone business viable-enough if the phones are inherently designed to support this.